Isle of the Extinct

Twenty-Six: Hunted

Though its wounds had blinded its mind, the mutant Carnotaurus did not stop lurching forward until it had reached the deepest recess of the woodland. Every laboured breath it took was a pathetic protest against its misery, every limping step growing a slight bit more agonising the more it staggered along on its broken body. Young shoots and old stalks alike were ripped from the earth in the wake of its slithering path, and the local creeks churned as the beast slid painfully alongside them. It could feel none of this, however; it was entirely numb to the destruction it caused. Dead to the world, dead to itself. A hollow ghost. 

Out of nowhere, a scar in the earth seemed to open up right below its feet. With a great bellow, the mutated monster crashed to its feet into the crevice, sending a shockwave channeling through the ground. The magnitude of its fall never registered in the creature's brain. It was focused on the crevice in its own leg.

The gash was black and bottomless, oozing a profuse mixture of blood and pus on its sides, with ribbons of decaying flesh dangling out of the wound. What remained of scabs had crumbled away to dust, leaving the laceration exposed to the elements, and maggots. Dozens of them. It had learned perhaps the last lesson it would ever know: allosaur claws could cut deep. The battle had been swift yet brutal, both opponents walking away scathed badly, yet it had gotten the lion's share of injury. Fueling the fire was the fact that the claws had made their mark on its unarmoured thigh. The bones weren't too far off from them.

Mutation had gifted it speed and resilience no ordinary predator could possess, but it did not make its hide any thicker, any harder to pierce. The wound remained stubbornly open and bleeding. Its fate was a foregone conclusion. The squirming, writhing sensation of the maggots burrowing deeper into the flesh, the trickle of hot blood seeping between the ground and its skin, its painfully-gnarled horns and spines, made death seem like a liberty.

Suddenly, a gush of air flew towards it, like the whistle of a terrible punching force. Then came a pulverising grip that clamped itself around the animal's neck, along with what felt like ten swords sinking themselves into its trachea. Torture came to it instantaneously and ruthlessly, every fibre in its body taking the brunt of it all in those few moments. Its skull felt as if it was being flailed in three different directions at once, before being slammed into the earth with a thundering crunch.

Then it felt its hide splitting apart, being pierced by those twelve-inch teeth. Bones snapping, caving in underneath the sheer pressure, arteries popping like grapes and flesh being obliterated crushed into its throat for a few jagged seconds, light and darkness flashing in sparks before its eyes. Then, after a dozen minute-long seconds, the darkness won over.

The second creature hunched itself over its prize, languidly shaking its head to splatter some of the residual blood off. A full-grown carnotaur was quite the haul; perhaps the effort sank into tracking it down was worth the reward. Ripping into the carcass, the dinosaur tore off a haunch of thick flesh, tossing its head back to devour the entire slab whole. With meat of this quality, it had been assured its trouble had not gone to waste. While the meat slid down its throat fluidly, something else did not.

Lingering in its mouth was the flesh's uncanny aftertaste. Sharp, steely, bitter. The only recollection the dinosaur had of this new taste was the time a fellow carnivore had bitten its snout while contending for territorial rights. That was the moment when it first tasted its own blood, completely dissimilar to the viscera of prey animals. It was the same harsh, repulsive taste. Metallic.

The dinosaur then looked down to see tiny puddles pooling beneath its jaws. Blood...and another liquid. Contrasting starkly against the luxuriant red of flesh and gore, the second liquid seemed to bear a bluish-purple hue, its peculiar tint still staying strong even when dissolving into the pools of blood. Some sort of foreign substance. Something now in its bloodstream.